Are hardware vendors starting to bail on FreeBSD ... ?
Darrin Chandler
dwchandler at stilyagin.com
Wed Jul 26 19:01:11 UTC 2006
On Wed, Jul 26, 2006 at 03:36:51PM -0300, User Freebsd wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Nikolas Britton wrote:
>
> >* No binary blob drivers.
>
> This is one that I don't necessarily agree with ... if Adaptec came out
> with a *supported* iir driver, but it was binary only, I'd be happy with
> that ... I just want to know that if I *have* a problem with a piece of
> hardware, that I can get support for it ...
A lot of people agree with you, but I'm not one of them. It's not about
you being inconvenienced in this particular case. It's about choice, and
vendors supporting the customers by providing *specs*.
What if they provide a blob for FreeBSD but you decide you want to run
NetBSD on a particular machine and there's no blob? Or much more likely:
what if they provide a blob for Linux, but not for FreeBSD? Should they
also provide a blob for Plan 9?
If the specs are not open, then your choices are limited to what the
vendor wants to develop and support. And that's likely to be Windows,
and maybe Linux, and maybe maybe FreeBSD.
OTOH, if the vendor opens the specs then good, solid drivers can be
written for whatever platform. And ported. And if there's a problem it
can be fixed. This even turns out to benefit people who don't give a
hoot about whether something is "free" or "open" or not.
--
Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD Users Group
dwchandler at stilyagin.com | http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/
http://www.stilyagin.com/ |
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